FPGAs already map complex circuits and hardware onto LUTs and other slices, so what’s another layer of abstraction? Chisel and other newer HDL languages focus on expressing high-level general-purpose elements that get mapped onto hardware. In broad strokes, Verilog and VHDL are focused on expressing hardware and then added abstraction on top of that over the year. Under the hood, Chisel is Scala with some custom libraries that know how to map Scala concepts onto hardware. ’s version uses Chisel, a new HDL from the Berkley and RISCV communities. set out to turn that on its head by implementing Game Of Life in the hardware of an FPGA. The usual approach is to just iterate over every cell in the grid, computing the next state into a new grid buffer. Munged Ferris Bueller quotes aside, Conway’s Game of Life is the classic cellular automata that we all reach for. We can’t get enough of our calculator hacks here, so make sure to check out the CPU transplant on this vintage Soviet calculator.Ĭontinue reading “Old Casio Calculator Learns New Tricks” → Posted in classic hacks, Software Hacks Tagged assembly, calculator, casio, conways game of life, forth, game of life He also managed to get a version of Conway’s Game Of Life running, check out the video after the break. ended up porting a Forth interpreter, which defaults to RPN style, to finally achieve his humble objective. With RAM to burn, new routines were created to write custom characters to the screen, and a new font was created to squeeze more characters onto the display than normal. Here, the contents of RAM could be easily modified with custom code, then uploaded back into the calculator. With 32KB of RAM there ended up being plenty of room for experimentation, and uploading a program into RAM was simplified by using Casio’s original backup software to dump the RAM onto a PC. With the entire calculator emulated in software, the plan from here involved replacing one of the BASIC commands in ROM with new code that would jump to an address in RAM. Incredibly, the MAME framework already featured a ‘partial implementation’ of the calculator’s CPU, which was a much needed shot in the arm when it came time to write a full-featured emulator. The first step in cracking this calculator wide open was a ROM dump, followed by writing a disassembler. An RPN interpreter written in assembly language would be much faster. The calculator in question can already run its own version of BASIC, however the bespoke Hitachi CPU struggles performance-wise with complex programs, and wouldn’t be a realistic way of using RPN on the calculator. Needing a project to keep him occupied, he decided to upgrade his 90s Casio CFX-9850G calculator to run custom machine code.Īll really wanted was for his vintage calculator to understand Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). recently found himself stung by the burden of free time while in lockdown. If you want to learn a little more about these displays, check out this love letter to the VFD.Ĭontinue reading “This Retro Game Console Puts Vacuum Fluorescent Display To Good Use” → Posted in Arduino Hacks, classic hacks Tagged conways game of life, game console, noritake, snake, vacuum fluorescent display, vfd We really like the look of this console, and we appreciate putting an otherwise obsolete display to use in a creative way. We’d imagine Pong would be a good choice too, as well as perhaps Tetris if the display were flipped on its side. chose appropriately blocky games for the console, like Snake, Conway’s Game of Life, and the venerable snow demo. To celebrate the retro look of the VFD, both cases are decked out with woodgrain side panels. The display case connects to the controller with a ribbon cable and holds the VFD power supply and driver. The controller holds the Arduino Nano and all the controls, plus a piezo buzzer for fun. chose a two-piece design for his console, with a separate controller and display. Turning on either set of segments yields one of the two base colors, while turning on both yields a sorta-kinda whitish color, if you squint a bit. Each pixel is composed of six short linear segments, with alternating red and blue colors. The Noritake Itron GU20X8-301 VFD is a “tricolor” display with eight rows of 20 rectangular pixels. In a lot of ways, the design of ’s Arduino-based VFD console is driven by his choice of display. So when we see something like a VFD game console, we just have to sit up and take notice. But this is Hackaday, and we don’t really pay much attention to what we’re supposed to do, but rather to what’s fun and cool to do. Small in size, low-resolution, blocky segments, and a limited color palette - all characteristics of the typical vacuum fluorescent display, any of which would seem to disqualify them as the display of choice for a lot of applications.
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